Published on the 14/12/2022 | Written by Heather Wright

Taming the multicloud chaos with metacloud…

Forget the metaverse. Businesses might want first to consider the metacloud as they seek to tame the multicloud chaos they’ve found themselves in with 10 years of heterogeneous multicloud deployments creating ‘considerable complexity’ in cloud management.

Deloitte is tipping the metacloud – also known as superclouds or sky computing – as a key trend for the coming 18 to 24 months as companies awake to the grey lining of the cloud: The tangled web of cloud tools which are sometime interconnected, but just as often redundant, and always adding additional complexity.

For many organisations one cloud just isn’t enough.

“The ultimate outcome should be greater simplicity.”

A recent VMware report, the Multi-cloud Maturity Index, found that across APAC and Japan, use of multiple clouds was ballooning with 70 percent of the nearly 2,000 organisations surveyed using multiple clouds – up from just 43 percent two years ago. Interestingly, those numbers are well above the global average, according to VMware, with 64 percent currently using multicloud.

Other reports, including Flexera’s 2022 State of the Cloud report, suggest much higher demand for multicloud, with 89 percent of respondents in that survey having a multicloud strategy. Deloitte for its part says as much as 85 percent of businesses are using two or more cloud platforms, with 25 percent using at least five.

Sometimes it’s a strategic decision to increase flexibility, control costs, monetise data and navigate data residency requirements. But often it’s an accidental outgrowth resulting from different teams within an organisation preferring to run apps or workloads on different clouds.

Either way, the proliferation of platforms and as-a-service offerings is creating complexity, inefficiencies and redundancies.

While a multicloud strategy can provide specialised capabilities and optimised pricing (96 percent of Kiwi private sector organisations in the VMware survey reported that their multicloud approach had had a positive impact on revenue and profitability in the past year) applications and workloads can be challenging to design and operate. Maintaining multiple security configurations and data repositories, increased architectural complexity, cloud sprawl and the associated costs are all challenging organisations.

The VMware report, which surveyed organisations with 500+ employees, noted that just one in five organisations surveyed across Asia Pacific and Japan is realising business value from multicloud, with the majority struggling with the complexity.

Enter the metacloud – also known as superclouds or sky computing ­– which offer a chance to move ‘above’ the cloud, providing a common layer of abstraction and automation to bring, in theory, simplicity and visibility.

“With these cross-cloud services managing operations, governance and security, organisations can take full advantage of cloud versatility, elasticity, flexibility and scalability,” Deloitte says in its Tech Trends 2023: Trending the trends, 14 Years of Research report.

The compatibility layer sitting above the clouds, leveraging their native technical standards through APIs to provide access to common services such as storage and compute, AI, data, security, operations, governance and application development and deployment.

“Metacloud does this through a common interface, giving administrators centralised control over their multiple cloud instances,” says Deloitte.

It’s a solution that could be particularly timely given skills shortages, with Deloitte noting it reduces the need for specialisation in the workforce, reducing the need for specialists in specific cloud platforms.

Security too, may be boosted, the professional services provider claims, enabling developers to set a single configuration from the compatibility layer that is executed across each cloud platform through its native interface.

While any of the big cloud providers could, technically, provide the metacloud layer, a UC Berkley paper suggests it’s the business, not technical, aspect that is complicated.

“We think achieving a widely usable compatibility layer is, on purely technical grounds, easily achievable,” Ion Stocia and Scott Shenka write in the Berkley paper.

“The problem is whether the market will support such an effort because, while the compatibility layer has clear benefits for users, it naturally leads to the commoditisation of the cloud providers, which may not be in their interests.”

Stocia and Shenka say they expect incumbent cloud providers to strongly resist the emergence of a compatibility layer.

“However, unlike some other arenas where standardisation requires universal agreement, the software for a compatibility layer can be ported to any cloud, even if the cloud does not wish to officially support it. Thus, users of a large a large incumbent cloud provider… might opt to use the compatibility interface rather than the cloud provider’s lower-level interfaces just to preserve portability.”

Third party vendors, however, are starting to step into the breach with governance tools providing a unified view of IT ecosystems via a single control plane.

For the most part, however, Deloitte says enterprises themselves are on the hook for building it themselves.

“Right now, there are few vendors offering metacloud as a service. Instead, development teams will need to take the lead building each of the connections and ultimately interface themselves.

“It’s a complex solution to dealing with complexity, but the ultimate outcome should be greater simplicity.”